View of Mt. Fuji from Nihonbashi

View of Mt. Fuji from Nihonbashi is a Keisai Eisen sheet that takes up one of the most over-determined subjects in late-Edo ukiyo-e: the silhouette of Mount Fuji seen from the Nihonbashi bridge at the heart of the city. Nihonbashi was the official kilometre zero of the Tokugawa road network - the starting point of the Tokaido, the Kisokaido and three other major highways - and Mount Fuji, sixty miles to the southwest, was visible from the bridge on clear winter days as the centre of the eastern horizon. By the 1830s Hokusai had already published his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and the subject was firmly in the public imagination. Eisen's print works inside that tradition. It uses the bridge and its crowd of travelers, merchants and porters as the foreground, the river and its boats as the middle ground, and the white cone of Fuji as the distant pictorial summit of the composition. The sheet is preserved in the ukiyo-e.org archive (Eisen Keisai, No Series, View of Mt Fuji from Nihonbashi). As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape, the print is a useful index of how Eisen, primarily known for bijin-ga, absorbed and contributed to the new full-landscape idiom that defined the last great phase of ukiyo-e before Eisen's death in 1848.